


But There Is This

by wintercreek



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-18
Updated: 2010-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-13 18:35:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/140409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintercreek/pseuds/wintercreek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seniors may not have all the answers, but sometimes stories, perspective, and good partners are enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But There Is This

**Author's Note:**

  * For [humantales](https://archiveofourown.org/users/humantales/gifts).



> Thanks to Starlady and my ever-patient spouse for betaing!

"Were we ever that young?" Carl asked, watching the gate swing closed behind Dairine. He sat down in an Adirondack chair, his descent a mock swoon, complete with a hand to his brow.

Tom grinned as he perched on the edge of the neighboring chair. "Well, I was, and I presume you were too. But since I wasn't there to witness it, it's possible you were hatched, full-formed, at the age of twenty and just never told me about it."

Carl socked him gently in the arm. "Wise guy. Of course I was fourteen once. But never like _that_."

"She's got a hard road ahead of her," Tom agreed. "And it's at least partially of her own making. I wish I knew how to tell her that she doesn't have to be all flashy spectacle in everything she tries."

Snorting, Carl suggested, "Maybe you should tell her that story about your ill-fated transformation. You were what, fifteen?"

Tom ducked his head. "Sixteen, not that it's any better. It seemed like a good idea at the time!"

"I'm sure. I'll get you a beer if you'll tell the story again." Carl stood to go into the house.

"Dairine's not here," Tom pointed out, relaxing into his Adirondack chair.

When Carl came back out, a cold bottle in each hand, he smiled at Tom and said, "Tell it to me for practice. C'mon, I'll trade you. I've got stories from my teen years that are just as good, I promise."

Tom took a long pull of his beer, then looked thoughtfully at the weeping birches in the corner of the yard. Carl wondered if he'd been distracted by the dappled light coming through the rustling leaves. But after another minute, Tom seemed to have gathered his thoughts.

"So. I was sixteen," he began. "It was a dry summer, so dry that there was some concern about wildfires in Yosemite. You remember what it's like, right? Up there in the Sierra Nevadas, mostly wilderness–"

"–and it's _huge_. The size of Rhode Island?" Carl broke in.

Tom nodded. "Yeah. All it takes is a lightning strike in July, when everything's like tinder, and you get one of those huge fires that roar across the slopes. They're like a wall of heat and noise and flame. Terrifying, but natural and necessary. The National Park Service was just starting to understand the value of controlled burns over total fire suppression, back then, which meant sometimes one of us got called in to finesse the situation. That's what it was with me: my local Senior wanted someone to oversee a controlled burn up by Hetch Hetchy in the Tiltill Valley. For emergencies, mostly. I didn't have a partner then, so I headed out there alone.

"I didn't have any business being up there as far as the Forest Service was concerned, of course. Some teenaged kid, wanting to watch the excitement, getting underfoot?" He paused for another drink of beer. "The best solution I could come up with was not to be a teenaged kid."

Carl smiled, recognizing this part. He circled his hand, gesturing for Tom to continue.

"Yeah, you remember. I ran into a grizzly while I was trying to figure out what to be, and she turned out to be a wizard. It seemed like a hint from Someone!" Tom chuckled. "You know what firefighters and park rangers aren't blasé about? A pair of grizzlies."

"I bet!" Carl threw back his head and laughed. When he stopped, he saw Tom gazing into the birches again. "Tom?"

Tom's lips twitched into a rueful almost-smile. "Just thinking how lucky I was. The firefighters banged their axes on the truck beds, and Rahj and I pretended to be scared off. We had to do a small wizardry to keep an eye on them from well up the slope. It would have been so easy for something to go wrong, you know. One of them could have pulled a gun on us, or the fire could have jumped the backburn without anyone noticing, or we could have simply been too slow to help if they needed it." He looked down at his hands, wrapped around the beer bottle, and then back up. "It's the usual, I suppose. A dozen ways to disaster, and there I was: wrapped up in the false invincibility of youth. You'd think the Ordeal would open everyone's eyes to the precariousness of life, or something—" He trailed off.

"Hey." Carl leaned across the arm of his chair to put his hand on Tom's, giving it a reassuring squeeze. "Nothing went disastrously wrong. You said so. And that's all we can ask, most days. I know it gets easier to see the potential for trouble as you get older, but you can't let that be all you see."

"I know." After they sat in silence for a few minutes, Tom squeezed Carl's hand back and let go. "It _was_ fun being a bear, although maybe I shouldn't tell Dairine too much about that. I could stick to the parts about the simplest solution being the best, rather than the dramatic and flashy sort of unnecessary transformation that gets you chased off by firefighters."

Carl raised an eyebrow. "And what would you say that 'simplest solution' is, now that you're so much older and wiser?"

Furrowing his brow, Tom said, "Uh. You know, I'm not sure, actually. It's not like transforming into something smaller would have been any easier, and I don't think I could have done an airwalk over a wildfire. Too much energy circulating in the air, and someone would definitely have noticed a disruption in the air flow. Invisibility and short-range teleportation with very careful air displacement, I think."

"Sounds good to me. Now, my turn." Carl cleared his throat. "I was working with a partner, but she was home with a cold and I was sure I could take care of everything on my own. It was a minor working, really, but for some reason every time we tried to set up our circle we attracted all these pigeons..."

Carl's hands moved as he spoke, and Tom smiled, his face crinkling along his laughlines. The light behind the birches had dropped and deepened to sunset gold as the evening wore on. Still, it was full dark before the two men paused in their storytelling to move inside. They didn't have all the answers, and they never would, but they did have this.


End file.
